


Sequelle

by Mama_Nihil



Category: Ghost (Sweden Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Purple Prose, i dont know yet, this might just be Sister Imperator's prehistory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 07:18:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15791679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mama_Nihil/pseuds/Mama_Nihil
Summary: Okay, so apparently this latest album awakens feelings of “yearning for something that’s lost” in me. Go figure. No matter. Anything that pours from my pen, I welcome it. More than welcome it – I’m so grateful I could spontaneously combust. So, Ghost: if the universe is conducive to mental messages, let me just send you the biggest, most heart-felt, one creative to another, gigantic kukus maximusthank youfor unlocking my writer’s block!And, um… apologies for the result.





	1. In Absentia

When he left, she was only fifteen years old. Young enough to look up to him with a naïve and cleanish heart, old enough to feel the first tentative tendrils of something else. Something – despite their generally lenient faith – definitely out of bounds. Not because it was forbidden, or even immoral. But it was _dangerous_ somehow. Dangerous for her, and maybe even for him. Her regard for him – yes, regard, they’d begun using archaic language to mark their position as caretakers of an ancient new culture – was tinged with a longing that had no place in their leader/devotee relationship.

Of course he was no longer a leader, but Ken was undoubtedly – agonizingly, heart-breakingly – a devotee. She didn’t care that he’d stepped down from the pedestal early on. Before the church was even built, before the first bad harvest, he’d handed the reins to his right hand woman, citing weariness, incompetence, words Ken didn’t understand. Some said he’d seen them coming, those seven years of famine, and had abdicated as a shrewd strategy: to avoid being blamed, to avoid taking responsibility. Those were the ones who saw nothing but a scheming, cold-blooded rat.

Fair enough.

But others were less judging and more disappointed. They offered their hearts as argument. _Don’t leave us in our hour of need_.

 _But I’m not leaving you. I’m just leaving the helm to someone else_.

And then slowly, imperceptibly, he’d left after all. First like a ghost that melts into air the moment you try to focus, and then one day he left in the practical, physical sense. The news was like a sliced fingertip. First there was nothing, no sensation at all. Then that hot, tingly feeling that’s the harbinger of anguish, the deep breath before you realize it’s actually a wound.

And then pain and blood, blood and pain, hitting with full force. His absence was total, concrete, absolute. An absence that cut Ken’s soul from her body. The knife scraped so close to bone she could have pointed out the location on an anatomical map.

A day of sorrow, of theft, of hate and love. A day that would fester forever. A week in bed, nursing her wound, and then reality had returned. She’d gone on living – living and partly living. But always, always there was an echoing void where Papa had been. His accidental touch, the brushing of fingers against an arm, an encouraging smile. She didn’t realize how much she’d depended on those tiny gestures of approval until they were gone.

And she changed. She didn’t do her part embroidering the altar cloth. What was the point when their pope was no longer there? Who would divide the bread in his stead? No one could. She would take no wafer from some usurper’s hands. That’s how she saw them now. Everyone, every single soul in their little village. As potential usurpers and traitors. They forgot so quickly. They didn’t care. They had their day-to-day duties and topics of gossip. Why would they worry about a mouth they no longer had to feed?

But Ken worried, and Ken cared. She sang his hymns under her breath, whispered the words of his sermons before falling asleep, and stroked aching fingers over the curves of the inverted cross he’d helped erect. For her, his image didn’t fade over time. For her, he was more real than the golden fields her neighbours tilled. Sure, they all claimed injuries and suffering, remnants of disease, the aches and pains that were the price of survival. They all nodded in shared resignation over the ruined skin where the sickness had eaten, but where time and chance and destiny had made the buboes shrink again and disappear.

Yes, they all had scars. But hers were of a different kind.

And yet she felt the lethal crush of guilt. How could she claim deeper hurt and special treatment? How could she reject the banal goings-on of their world when that was all they had? Why did she, alone among all her peers, not settle and accept? What was so special about her that she couldn’t push Papa out of her mind and apply herself to the tangible? Why did she only grudgingly contribute to the survival of their settlement?

Because his eyes haunted her. Those _eyes_. Every waking moment, every minute of sleep, they were there, watching. They wouldn’t let her forget. In the night they were realer than the moon.

She never spoke of it, of course. No one would understand – or that’s what she told herself. Everyone else managed to pretend, to smile through their memories, to repeat ad nauseam how lucky they were, how happy. How they were Satan’s chosen, and they would sacrifice to him in gratitude and build a tower and offer their first-born lambs and yada-yada-yada. Stale old words stolen from holy writ and tweaked to fit their new religion. As if gowns you’d outgrown could be renewed with a few patches here and there.

It chafed. It itched. It stretched her skin like a straitjacket. How could she be the only one who saw, who felt, who remembered?

Years went by, years of smiling and tilling and embroidering pretence. Far away the horizon glowed in jewel-pink, but Ken just sat and sewed in her tower of stone. The path away was too steep, and wolves populated the woods. If she ventured out, her body would be torn to shreds. She’d seen it in her sewing. 

That's what she became: the seamstress of their simple life. Her yarns were told in thread, and she must obey the dictate of her needle. She was the one who stitched their beginnings, who unravelled their yesterdays. What she didn’t push through the fabric and pull out the other side would never come to pass. A responsibility so great it encompassed the world, and yet to the outside eye, what did she do but sit, and sit, and sit? Locked inside her room, hands busy with an embroidery no one else could see. They just thought her hands were restless, but while they slept she sewed their dreams and the outlines of their tomorrow. If she left her embroidery, the world would be gone in the morning.

And one day, that’s exactly what she did. She put down her hands, meaning to rest for a couple of moments, but she kept sitting, staring through the window at the distant hazy mountains, just wondering, just wandering and lost. Then, as if in a dream, she laid aside her needlework, rose from her chair and went to the window. A faint breeze stirred her hair and she breathed in deeply, filling her lungs. She walked to the door and tried it. Swinging soundlessly wide on well-oiled hinges, it revealed the murky stairs that led down, down, down in a never-ending spiral.

And so, as suddenly as Papa had, she left too. Just like that. From one day to the next, she’d had enough. From one day to the next, she grew up.

And her path led straight into the wilderness.


	2. Day Zero

At first she thought she was alone, that no one had seen her go and they’d all wake up in the morning, wondering where she’d disappeared to. But after half a day of walking, a few of them caught up with her. As time went by, more of them arrived. They toiled through woods and over mountains, crossed streams and made camp with bare necessities. They followed her not because she was a leader, but because someone was moving and they couldn’t stay behind. They knew the village was dying, because it no longer had a soul.

And so one by one they joined her, just a few rag-tag outcasts with nothing to gain from staying, until finally their group was somehow, in some sense, complete. People who had never spoken to each other in the village were now part of a tightknit group of seekers and survivors, led by a woman who never acknowledged her role of pathfinder. They just silently followed, and they never went to her with their complaints or questions, their dreams and disputes. She was just a magnet that pulled them along, over stock and stone, the embodiment of their unspoken mission.

“What’s the point, though?”

It was the first time Qalen had talked to her, ever. But once he opened his mouth, it was as if they’d always been friends. As if they shared a mind.

“Why leave one church to go build another one?” she reformulated the question. “No _universal_ reason. I have mine, and you have yours, surely.”

Qalen shrugged where he sat cleaning out his eating bowl in a slimy-looking brook. “I don’t buy the whole supernatural force thing at all.”

“Which is fine.”

“I know.” He looked up through his ragged fringe, and his insect-in-amber stare cut through her bullshit. “But you’re projecting those things on _him_.”

She frowned at her own bowl, at her hands with the small tuft of sandy moss, scratching and scraping, cleaning and polishing. “So?”

“So you’ll be disappointed when we finally find him.”

“You actually think we will, then?”

Qalen snorted. “Why else do all this godforsaken walking?”

She smiled. “God?”

He rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean. And I stand by what I said. We all want to find him, but _you_ …” He shook his head. “That’s a whole other ballgame, isn’t it?”

“What do you want me to say? That I lo–” Her throat clicked shut. “Fuck.”

Qalen chuckled thinly. “Open book much?”

“Fuck off." So what if Qalen could read her? Of course she loved Papa. That was duh level of insight. But saying it out loud… She swallowed, but the words were caught in a tangle of memories. She couldn’t use them without disturbing the snakes.

“I’m sorry.” Qalen sighed and shook his bowl, sending a scatter of sun-pierced crystals all over her face. She wiped her cheeks with the arm of her jacket and tried to pretend it didn’t look like she was wiping tears.

“It’s been so long,” she muttered, half in concession, half to convince herself. But time was meaningless, she knew that. Your wounds could heal and the thin white line cover them like nothing had ever happened, and then suddenly you passed that way again, the place the blow was dealt, and _rrrrip_ the bloody fronds were gaping wide again. Life saying _fuck you and your fake fucking recovery. Fuck moving on, and fuck anyone who thinks they’ll one-up my batshit timeline_.

They were all just one step away from chaos.

“I guess it shows some greatness of spirit,” Qalen said, squatting with his elbows on his knees, bowl hanging between them and gaze lost among the trees. “To hold on to what you l… _believe_ in. For so long.”

“Like I have a choice.”

Qalen shrugged. “All our virtues are either innate or instilled in childhood. No choice involved for anyone. Still. Take pride in what you can.”

Ken gazed at the dull brook, at the way it gurgled and spit its way over the stones, and couldn’t feel pride in anything. All she felt – all she’d felt for an age – was emptiness, and the debilitating fear that Papa had left because to him it was all one. That while she’d built her whole world around him, she was a mere speck of dirt in his.

Maybe that was the answer she sought. Maybe that was the treasure at the end of the rainbow.

She stood up and stuffed her bowl into her rucksack. Her knees were damp and speckled with bits of dried leaf, but she didn’t brush it off. Her soul was marked by history, by the razor-sharp edges of his life touching hers, and the blood had dried in secret slashes. It felt right that such imperfections should be outwardly visible, if only for a minute. Like pock marks of the heart, symbolized by a layer of dirt.

If Qalen saw through her convoluted way of externalizing her petty hurts, he didn’t give a sign. Didn’t even glance at the state of her knees, just turned and led the way back to the encampment. She fell into step behind him, restless like an anthill and tender like a bruise. All this time, and no one to confide in. This endless stretch of years, and not a word of confession.

She grabbed Qalen’s arm. He turned in surprise, and she hesitated. Why had she stopped him? What did she want to say? What was the phrase that would turn the key to her voluntary prison?

“I don’t just love him,” she gulped. “I’m a _part_ of him.”

Heinous words, ridiculous. Embarrassing and pompous. Hubris in the extreme. And yet they fell like pieces in a puzzle, each bit linking to the next in a perfect pattern. She held her breath, afraid to have provoked some jealous Norn of fate, to have jinxed her entire existence, but nothing happened. No hell-finger reached up to strike her down, no chasm opened at her feet.

Qalen just cocked his head in quizzical amusement. “You barely spoke to each other.”

And there it was: the rending cloth, the gulf of utter dread. She was no one in Papa’s life. He had never needed her, had never even liked her all that much. Tolerated, yes. Done his best to seem polite. But behind that almost-smile she’d imagined specially crafted for her, there had just been a void. The way he’d nodded almost imperceptibly when she spoke her mind in church, the way his eyelashes had fluttered in suppressed laughter when she’d tried to be funny – they had all been for show. The connection she’d imagined was a sham, a cosmic prank: the thought that anyone, let alone him, the all-important _him_ , would ever find her more than mildly annoying…

Her heart. It was ashes.

Qalen reached out a hand and she flinched, gasped. “Forget it.” Her voice was tin against stone when she laughed. “I was just joking.” Pushing past him, she hurried up towards the huddle of makeshift tents, body all aflame with acid. He’d found the chink in her armour, and now her defences were all down. The pulsing core of her laid bare for all to see.

“Wait… Ken!”

Her feet carried her away from that all too knowing voice, laid safety-building space between them. She would never again confide in anyone, never again admit the horrifying truth. Because the innermost kernel of what she was, her complete and utter essence, wasn’t good or bad, was neither immoral nor insane.

It was just a fucking joke.


End file.
